Glitch will be the next Instagram

I'm calling the peak of the Instagram reto "film" filters thing. Soon enough that visual language will be dead as cupcakes. Recently I poked fun at Apartment Therapy for calling bathroom home offices a trend, and they had three data points to support that claim. I've got exactly none, but I'm going for it anyway.

What's going to replace Instagram as the way to make a boring photo cool? I say what's next is glitching. Glitch is a movement - or at least an aesthetic:

Glitch art [via Wikipedia] is the aestheticization of digital or analog errors, such as artifacts and other "bugs", by either corrupting digital code/data or by physically manipulating electronic devices.

Ordinary digital photos, like the ones we take of our lunches every day, are pretty boring, and generally - at least technically - pretty good. Instagram and its ilk put some noise and quirk into regular shots, adding a tiny bit of what film used to deliver - randomness. Glitch can do that too, and it it'll do it in a native digital language instead of a folksy but ultimately bogus analog one. It's the imagery of the DIYer, the Maker and the hardware hacker. Glitch shows you how many things have to work just right to make a digital picture show up, by breaking them just a bit.

I think soon enough there will be glitch camera apps, maybe even glitch filters for Instagram. Somebody will make a digital camera that will be to digital cameras as Holgas and Dianas were to film cameras. As a way of easing the transition, here's a cat photo that's been glitched and also instagrammed. You saw it here first, trendspotters.

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1 Response

Professor N

There was a central plot theme in Wreck it Ralph which was about a video game character who glitched. In the end she learned to embrace it as a virtue, etc. But it was a central selling point, and it made her cooler than other characters in the end.